Such a communication switching element adapted to switch cells or packets subdivided in subcells or subpackets is already known in the art, e.g. from the published European patent application EP 0 301 934-A1. Therein, only the first subcell of each cell contains information about the output destination of the whole cell and the storage means include First-In-First-Out (FIFO) queue memories--one for each output--which only store the memory location identities or addresses of the first subcells of each cell. Each of these stored identities is further associated to a number corresponding to the length of the cell to which the first subcell belongs, i.e. the number of subcells constituting the cell. This number, which has to be known when the identity corresponding to the first subcell is stored in the storage means, is also contained in this first subcell and is used to rebuild the cell at the output of the switching element. This means that there is a practical limitation on the number of subcells constituting a cell. Indeed, when for instance 4 bits are reserved in the first subcell to indicate the length of the cell in binary code, this cell is limited to have a maximum of 16 subcells.